This blog is being run by Sophia (she/her/elle), a 21-year-old English student currently enrolled in a Fundamentals of Digital Literacy course. As one of the requirements of the course is starting a blog, she's decided to stick with the platform she's the most familiar with: Tumblr.

Here is her self-portrait! The line art was made using a ReMarkable tablet, and she coloured it using Clip Studio Paint's mobile app.

The Platformer

So, the first thing I wanted to do in creating the platformer prototype for the first assignment is to brainstorm some ideas of the gameplay loop, some core mechanics, and some unique selling points.

My first decision is that I want to make the game using pixel art since GDevelop has a large variety of tools with pixel art in mind. It would also allow me to make my own assets or use some of the many free asset packs commonly used for gamejams. I kind of want to see if I can design a full game around the assets within the pack.

The assets within this free pack available on the GDevelop store gave me an idea for a puzzle-platformer with an interesting mechanic. I could reasonably make a platformer where you can switch between various realities where different platforms exist only in the one you are currently viewing. I believe it has a lot of potential and could be quite fun too. Another small mechanic I thought of would be enemies that stay in their respective worlds so you could swap out and back in order to 'dodge' them.

I have settled on the "1-Bit Platformer Pack" by Kenney as I believe it would suit the potential mechanic well, falls under CC0 (allowing me to use it without attribution), and is by the same author as the player sprite used by the tutors.

I intend to change the colours of the sprites depending on the 'reality' the player is in, keeping a few select platforms a neutral colour that exist in all realities.

I can not believe I'm using Tumblr of all websites for a class at a real-life university that I pay thousands of dollars to every few months.

Hello!! I'm Ares, I use he/him pronouns, and I'm a 19-year-old second-year Junior. I'm majoring in computer programming & applications, but if you have no idea what that is, you can just think of me as a computer science major who can't do basic math and call it a day.

Outside of classes, I am a computer technology intern at the Innovation Hub and the Creative Chair for DevLUp @ FSU, and I'm an active member of the 2099 Comic Book Club, the Pride Student Union, Seminole Innovators, the Disabled Student Union, and the ASLC Film Committee. That is to say, I do a lot of things all of the time, and I am very tired.

Before I discuss my interests and successes, let me make sure you don't set the bar too high and discuss one of my failures. To briefly call back to my earlier "joke" about not being able to do basic math, I failed Calculus 2 three separate times at three separate colleges, which I think is honestly impressive. For this reason, I switched majors from meteorology to computer programming & applications, because meteorology required me to actually pass Calculus 2, and that clearly was not happening.

But! Within one semester, I remembered that I like computers so much more than I like most other things. So now, I've returned to the state I was in in high school: an autistic man who sits at his computer for several hours at a time until people want to call wellness checks on him. Except this time, instead of playing video games until I develop permanent nerve damage (oops), I spend my time making video games! My current game development project is a survival role-playing game with a working title of Mundane Mundane, which is a thinly-veiled metaphor for being transgender in modern society. I've helped with a few others for game jams, but I've only been properly developing games for about a year, so I don't have much to show for it at all!

I'm done yapping, here's my cat:

His name is Jazzy, and I love him more than life itself. I hope you love him too.

Goodbye and good luck.

Intelligence is about the expansion of knowledge to form an understanding of the world and other people. Part of this expansion means recognizing new information, and creating a network out of this information. A fundamental part of creating this network is the identification of patterns, and with these patterns forming connections about and between different data points. The creation of these networks and connections is what brings true understanding on a subject, these abilities presupposing intelligence.

3 KEYWORDS: Network, Connections, Understanding

The first image is a sketching of my ideas for images to exemplify my keywords.

NETWORK: Image 2 is a result of a p5.js code I wrote that creates a network of nodes from two starting nodes. The colorful lines are connections made between nodes of the same color.

LINK TO CODE:

CONNECTIONS: Image 3 is a digital drawing I did on procreate meant to represent the patterns humans identify in nature, creating fictional connections. These patterns may not have any actual connection (the cloud isn't really a bunny, and the stars aren't purposefully representing anything we know), but they were connections we created due to our intelligence.

UNDERSTANDING: Image 4 is a collage between an anatomical image and a digital drawing. This is meant to be a representation of emotional recognition and sympathy, which is a way we understand other human beings. I wanted the anatomical aspect as a reminder that despite the fact it is an emotional reflection, they are still based on a subconscious logical connection. We can't sympathize without the ability to look at previously catalogued examples of our own emotions, as well as make the connection between that experience and the expressions of the person in front of us.

LINK TO REFERENCE IMAGE:

Chroma Corps '24 fanart for my friendo @mauricehawkman's character Spencer who was an ex-realestate photographer.